MY INTRODUCTION to conspiracy theorist Mike Ruppert came at the Take Back America conference in early June, when I met Steve, a bearded man in a lumberjack shirt and worn jeans who runs Creative Spirituality booksellers, a roving book mobile that specializes in stocking book sales at meetings of progressive activists. As I waited for a breakout session to begin I browsed through Steve’s book racks, looking at the collected works of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, at Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s The Politics of Truth, at the most recent offerings of Eric Alterman and Michael Moore. Finally my eye settled on The New Pearl Harbor, a book by David Ray Griffin, who teaches at the Claremont School of Theology, and who, his bio says, “is the author and editor of more than 20 books.”

The New Pearl Harbor is a skeptical take on the “official account” of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based on the work of Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Paul Thompson, and Thierry Meyssan, the author of 11 Septembre 2001: L’Effroyable imposture, the French bestseller that argued that an American missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon on September 11. Griffin goes on to suggest that the Bush administration knew about the attacks in advance–indeed let them happen. The book caught my eye because it was being sold–displayed quite prominently, in fact–at a conference where Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, George Soros, and other Democratic eminences appeared.